We may be approaching the 21st century, but in Texas an ambitious
career woman who has the nerve to run for the U.S. Senate against a white male
can expect to encounter vicious comments that no man would ever have to endure.

Kay Bailey Hutchison won the special election to fill the seat
vacated by Lloyd Bentsen, who became treasury secretary, but not before
weathering a barrage of sexist abuse. She was called ``a female impersonator,''
``just the same old thing in a skirt'' and the ``Breck girl.'' Voters were
warned that despite her gender, Hutchison ``is no good for women and
children.''

Progressive women in the rest of the country will not be stunned
to learn that a macho culture like Texas' fosters such retrograde attitudes.
They may be surprised to discover that the remarks I quoted came not from men
but from women, and feminist women at that.

What do these feminists have against Hutchison? She certainly
knows something about the value of the women's movement: When she graduated
from law school in 1967, she had to take a job in TV journalism because
Houston's law firms wouldn't hire women. She says that if, as a child, she had
told her father she wanted to be a senator, ``he would have patted me on the
head and said, 'Kay, there are a lot of wonderful things you can do with your
life, but that's probably not one of them.' ''

Hutchison, however, is a conservative Republican, so even though
she favors abortion rights and sponsored state legislation to toughen rape laws
and promote equal credit opportunities for women, feminists behave as if she
were the greatest danger to women since the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini.

Which raises the question: If women's groups would rather elect a
moderate Democratic male than a conservative Republican female, what is it they
really care about?

Just last year -- the Year of the Woman, you recall -- we were
told that women had something unique and precious to bring to our governing
councils. ``Women represent a new way of doing things and a focus on a
different agenda,'' said California Treasurer Kathleen Brown. ``Their agenda is
close to home, close to issues that are very much on the public's mind.'' Sen.
Barbara Mikulski, D-Md., said, ``We speak in a different voice.''

But not, apparently, in different voices. Hutchison made the grave
error of assuming that a free adult female has the prerogative of making up her
own mind on political issues. Feminists, who fought for the right of women not
to be told they may live only one way, now presume to dictate to women
politicians, and women in general, that they may think only one way.

Transgressors are condemned and ostracized. The message sent out
by the feminist posse in Texas was that a woman who is not a liberal is not a
woman. She's an impersonator, a traitor, a quisling. Men may be free to range
across the political spectrum without having their Y chromosomes questioned,
but a woman who departs from the feminist agenda forfeits her membership in the
female sex.

Such gratuitous malice for women who march to their own drummer is
doubtless one reason so many females who endorse many of the goals of the
women's movement have no use for the movement itself. A 1989 poll found that
while 77 percent of American women think the feminist movement has improved the
lot of females, only 33 percent consider themselves feminists.

The dictionary defines feminism as ``the principle that women
should have political, economic and social rights equal to those of men.'' Most
women, though, have come to see it as just another word for liberalism.

In 1988, notes editor Karlyn Bowman of The American Enterprise
magazine, women voted 50-to-49 for George Bush over Michael Dukakis. Among
women who called themselves feminists, the ratio was 71-to-26 for Dukakis.
Conservative feminist women, upon learning that there can be no such thing,
stop regarding themselves as feminists and continue regarding themselves as
conservatives.

Steinem opposed Hutchison because, she said, ``having someone who looks
like us but thinks like them is worse than having no one.'' The argument that
biology should determine ideology didn't persuade the women of Texas. They
generally supported Hutchison, having concluded that she looks and thinks a lot
more like one of their own than some women they could think of. <
Copyright1993, Creators Syndicate Inc.

Stephen Chapman is syndicated as a libertarian columnist. He
writes for the Chicago Tribune.